Andrew Clavin and Senator Ted Cruz dissect the failures of "diversity" policies, mocking Pride Month’s corporate co-optation while praising Trump’s 2017 LGBTQ+ tweet. They blame progressive governance for Chicago’s homicides, LA’s homelessness, and Seattle’s opioid crisis, contrasting it with conservative wins like Cold War victory and welfare reform. Cruz links Trump’s 2016 win to working-class frustration over Washington’s corruption, citing bipartisan immigration failures and Dodd-Frank’s cronyist harm to small banks. The episode warns of partisan impeachment theater, framing economic stagnation and regulatory overreach as bigger threats than ideological battles, while Steven Crowder’s satire highlights modern censorship wars. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it's Pride Month, which comes right after Wrath Month and right before Gluttony Month and then Envy Month, and so on for the rest of the seven deadly sins, which are also known as the capital vices or the cardinal sins because they're mostly found in Washington, D.C. and among the most powerful members of the clergy.
But pride has now come to be associated with homosexuality, so that the queen of vices has become the vice of queens.
Yes, I know I made that joke yesterday, but it seemed worth repeating.
In Pride Month, gay people march down the streets in grotesque outfits that celebrate such proud gay achievements as sadomasochism, gender confusion, and exhibitionism.
Gay people who do not participate in Pride Month go to work to perform useful tasks and stay home to nurture faithful relationships so they don't get to march until Humility and Decency Month, which is scheduled for After We're All Dead.
Donald Trump celebrated the start of Pride Month with a tweet that said, quote, and this is a real quote, as we recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great nation, let us also stand in solidarity with the many LGBT people who live in countries that punish, imprison, or even execute individuals on the basis of their sexual orientation, unquote.
Gay activists immediately took issue with the tweet and called for someone to imprison and execute them lest they be seen to be agreeing with Donald Trump.
They then blame Trump for his clever plan to incite violence against them committed by themselves.
Many companies also want in on the Pride business.
Budweiser, for instance, has issued gay pride beer cups in the hopes that gays will relinquish their vaunted reputation for good taste and drink Budweiser beer.
Also Adidas, because if they don't advertise to gay people who's left, and Listerine Mouthwash for reasons I don't even want to think about.
On this Gay Pride Month, we at the Daily Wire hope all gay people will continue to enrich our country and their lives by not participating in Gay Pride Month.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Knuckleheads and Minority Trends00:02:54
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
On the west side of Manhattan, or as New Yorkers call it, the edge of the known world, there is a skyscraper that houses the New York Times, a former newspaper.
And on the pages of that newspaper, there's an op-ed section that we like to call Knucklehead Row.
Oh, hey, hey!
Oh, hey, ho!
Let's go down to Knucklehead Row.
And on that row of Knuckleheads, there writes a man named David Brooks, who today predicted the coming GOP apocalypse.
Brooks notes that a 2002 book predicted the end of the Republicans, but in fact, that didn't happen because older white voters and assimilated Hispanics swung to the right.
That made people think twice about predicting the end of Republicans, but not our man Brooks.
No, sir.
Brooks says this time the Republican Party is really doomed because millennials hate us.
He says, quote, today's generation gap is based on concrete lived experience that is never going to go away.
Unlike the silent generation and the boomers, millennials and Gen Z voters live with difference every single day.
Only 16% of the silent generation is minority, but 44% of the millennial generation is.
If you are a millennial in California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, or New Jersey, ethnic minorities make up more than half of your age cohort.
In just over two decades, America will be a majority minority country.
Young voters approve of these trends, unquote.
You see, folks, what makes the knuckleheads on Knucklehead Row knuckleheads is that they never talk to anyone but other knuckleheads.
Knucklehead confers with Knucklehead, confirming their knuckleheaded knuckleheadedness until the whole world seems to them as knuckleheaded as themselves.
Brooks thinks that we Republicans, we're conservatives, are sitting around wondering how we can hold off the great tide of minority majorities.
And since everyone they know agrees that that's what Republicans think, they figure it must be true.
They are, in short, knuckleheads.
No one gives a rat's ass about diversity.
No one cares what color people are.
No one cares about your lived experience with people of different colors.
What we care about is that the values that made this country great continue to guide the changes that time, demographics, and technology are bound to bring.
No one cares if you're brown or yellow or gay or anything else.
We just care that you're educated enough, responsible enough, and self-reliant enough to be free yourself and not to endanger our freedom.
Why We Left Google00:03:00
Also, we want to make observations and jokes about you without getting fired or thrown off Twitter.
In short, we on the right don't care what color you are as long as you're colored American.
We conservatives are the people who brought you the end of the Cold War, the rollback of the 70s and 80s crime wave, the prosperity of the 80s through 90s, the return to judicial constitutionalism, a welfare reform that really worked until Obama destroyed it, and the surge that ended the Iraq war.
You leftists are the folks who brought us crime, homelessness, widespread sexual malfeasance and disease, renewed racial animosity, the appeasement of jihadism, and the death of American education.
Maybe if you knuckleheads stopped talking to one another and started talking to us, you could stop obsessing over people's colors and microaggressions and other baloney and help us solve today's problems as we did the problems of the past while you were busy screwing stuff up in the name of diversity.
We will talk about that and Trump's visit to the UK, which are related, as I'll explain.
But first, let's talk about people stealing your stuff online.
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It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So, you know, speaking of diversity and the things that the distractions that come up, Donald, oh, I should mention, before I start, mailbag tomorrow.
Do not forget.
Stand the screaming.
Don't forget the mailbag.
Go to dailywire.com.
Go to the podcast.
Hit the podcast button.
Hit the Andrew Clavin podcast.
Hit that little mailbag symbol.
You can ask me anything you want if you're a subscriber.
If you're not a subscriber, I don't care what happens to you because we're not getting your lousy 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks for the year.
But if you are a subscriber, ask me about anything, your personal life, religion, politics.
All my answers are guaranteed 100% correct and will change your life on occasion for the better.
Sadiq Khan's Take00:15:08
The rest of the time, but I like to watch.
So anyway, watching the coverage of Trump in the UK.
And to me, it's hilarious that every time a president goes to the UK, it doesn't matter who it is, every time it's covered like the people in England are our arbiters of manners, that they have such good manners and they talk so well, you know, we are just fools, we look bad.
And so they criticize the president for being an American, for not talking like that, for having more rough and ready manners like Americans do.
And my feeling is, yeah, didn't we beat these guys in a war or something?
Do we have to care what they think of our manners?
And they don't understand that like the rest of the country really truly doesn't care whether the president looks good to the British or not.
And so they just cover the whole thing as this sort of they're the elites and we're the little guys.
We're the kind of up-and-coming, the parvenues, I guess is the word I'm looking for.
So Trump, of course, is who he is.
He's a bull in a China shop, but he goes over there and the fact is he is doing terrific.
He had a really, really good day.
And the Queen and he, they had a big, beautiful state occasion in Buckingham Palace and they shared toasts.
So here's the Queen's toast and we'll follow it up with Trump's toast.
As we face the new challenges of the 21st century, the anniversary of D-Day reminds us of all that our countries have achieved together.
After the shared sacrifices of the Second World War, Britain and the United States worked with other allies to build an assembly of international institutions to ensure that the horrors of conflict would never be repeated.
While the world has changed, we are forever mindful of the original purpose of these structures: nations working together to safeguard a hard-won peace.
Of course, it is not only our security which unites us, but our strong cultural links and shared heritage.
Now, the important thing here is that D-Day is coming up, and they're talking about the sacrifices and everything that they made.
Well, let's hear Trump's, because he basically echoed what the Queen said, and everybody has been talking about a lot of phony controversies, but this is what's really going on.
This evening, we thank God for the brave sons of the United Kingdom and the United States who defeated the Nazis and the Nazi regime and liberated millions from tyranny.
The bond between our nations was forever sealed in that great crusade.
As we honor our shared victory and heritage, we affirm the common values that will unite us long into the future.
Freedom, sovereignty, self-determination, the rule of law, and reverence for the rights given to us by Almighty God.
So, you know, this is important.
D-Day is coming up.
Obviously, the British heroism, courage, and acting really alone for quite some time against the Nazis.
You can't even begin to exaggerate it.
It was just an incredible.
We use Winston Churchill, of course, as the symbol of that, and he led the people through that.
But it was, in fact, the people who went up there in those little planes and got shot out of the sky by the massive German Luftwaffe who maintained their island and kept all those signs you see, keep calm, those British signs, keep calm.
You know, those are from World War II when ordinary people were being bombed into the back of Beyond and yet were living through it and facing the Nazis down.
They didn't know if they were going to be invaded any day.
They had to wait for Pearl Harbor, for the Americans to come into it.
And so that common heritage that we have, and we come from the same place, and the ideas that made this country what it is come from England.
Those things are just link us together.
And it really doesn't matter whether they like Trump or who likes Trump or not.
This is important stuff.
And that's the way it's being reported in England.
In England, he was getting really good reviews.
I mean, obviously, the more conservative papers liked him more, but even the Financial Times, Hale said it was common values celebrating common values.
The BBC, Donald Trump praises eternal friendship at state banquet.
If you don't think it went well, here is Christiane Amapur journalist, right, who hates everything Trump, hates everything right-wing, is a completely biased journalist.
And here she is talking about this first day.
The day has gone so well for President Trump and for his hosts here that there seems to be absolutely no outward semblance of any discomfort or anything other than a really warm and highly well received in terms of who he met and the royal family visit so far.
Yeah, talk to me more about that because this was a decidedly different day than he'll have for the rest of the week.
But inside the confines of this day, which was the royal reception, the state visit part of it, why do you think it went so well?
Well, look, the last thing that happened, the last public event of the day was the state banquet at Buckingham Palace.
And the pictures from in there were just stunning.
They were superb.
It is the kind of environment that the president we have learned to know enjoys.
It was the kind of reception that he enjoys.
And speaking to the Queen, he just looked incredibly comfortable.
And the Queen looked comfortable.
And, you know, Prince Charles, his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall.
And you saw Melania Trump, the first lady.
Everybody seemed to be just having a fairly good time.
So again, if Christian Amundborg is giving Trump good reviews, you know he did well.
MSNBC had a reporter who basically said, well, he's doing well now, but we'll get you, my pretty, and your little conservative policies too.
Listen to this.
Despite these pictures that are playing out, you have to say, very well for the president, behind the scenes, there are rumblings and questions.
And you know that the combination of the American press and the British press, which are two of the most inquisitive and determined press in the world, you know that many, if there have been incidents, they are likely to discover them and publicize them.
So I don't think we can necessarily assume that just because this is looking good now, that it will look good in the next few days.
I edited out the part where he said we're the most inquisitive press when a conservative is in office, when a liberal is in office.
Of course, they just become little chill hours yapping after them.
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You know, so the press ginned up all this fake outrage.
There was this thing with Megan Markle.
Trump was being interviewed, and the interviewer told him, I'll play it.
He told him that Meghan Markle, when she was still an American before she became the Duchess of Sussex, she had criticized him.
Megan, who's now the Duchess of Sussex, right?
We've given her a different name.
She can't make it because she's got maternity leave.
Are you sorry not to see her?
Because she wasn't so nice about you during the campaign.
I don't know if you saw that.
I didn't know that.
No.
I didn't know that.
No, I hope she's okay.
I did not know that.
She said she'd moved to Canada if you got elected.
Turned out she moved to Britain.
Well, that'd be good.
There are a lot of people moving here.
So what can I say?
No, I didn't know that she was nasty.
Is it good having an American princess then, Mr. President?
I think it's nice.
I think it's nice.
And I'm sure she'll do excellently.
She'll be very good.
She'll be very good.
I hope she does.
So, you know, oh, so then they said, well, Trump called her nasty.
He said Meghan Markle was nasty.
He was obviously saying, I didn't know she had said something nasty about me.
You know, Trump is not the most articulate, clearest person in the world, and they love to take everything he says out of control.
But who cares?
I mean, right, this is that Trump, he says these things.
He wasn't, he obviously was being quite nice to her in his way, but whenever he gets attacked, he has to attack back.
The one substantive thing is, what's his name?
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, who fashions himself a world leader in left-wing righteousness, basically, and has been assaulting Trump and Trump called him a loser.
But let's listen for a minute, because this is where we get to the whole diversity thing and the things that the left wants us to care about that mask what they are actually doing.
So let's listen to Sadiq Khan saying that the authorities there should have stood up to Trump.
Where is it?
It's cut five.
We disagree with him, surely, about his policy to ban Muslims from certain countries.
Surely we disagree with his policy to separate children from their parents on the Mexican border.
Surely we think it's wrong when he amplifies the tweets from racists in this country.
And surely we should be saying, listen, you know, you do realize you're a poster boy for the far-right movement around the world, from Hungary to Italy, France to the UK.
And also we should be saying, you know what?
We think we face a climate emergency.
We think you made a mistake walking away from the Paris Climate Change Accord.
Will you think about coming back?
Can we persuade you to come back?
And I could go on.
And my point is, Theresa May is so weak as a prime minister, and our government is so scared that it wouldn't say boo to a goose.
And I think that's wrong.
Our values aren't reflected by this prime minister.
We should be saying that to him.
So, here's Trump's response.
All right.
That was...
That was Trump's spiritual response, not what he actually said.
But let's just pause for a minute.
What he talked about, and he talked about this in other clips, is, oh, evil Donald Trump.
He's not with LGBT people.
Absolutely untrue.
He doesn't support abortion rights.
Oh, the lovely abortion rights.
Climate emergency is a climate emergency.
All the stuff that the left is talking about, diversity, diversity.
He's a right-winger because he doesn't, he associates with Victor Orban, who wants to keep Poland Hungry, Hungarian, and all this stuff, the diversity.
This is what we're talking about.
And this is why David Brooks is saying we're doomed, because we don't support all these wonderful, wonderful things that the millennials talk about.
All right.
So let's just listen for a minute to Trump's response.
This is cut nine.
I think he's been a not very good mayor from what I understand.
He's done a poor job.
Crime is up, a lot of problems.
And I don't think he should be criticizing a representative of the United States that can do so much good for the United Kingdom.
We talked about it before.
He should be positive, not negative.
He's a negative force, not a positive force.
And if you look at what he said, he hurts the people of this great country.
And I think he should actually focus on his job.
It'd be a lot better if he did that.
He could straighten out some of the problems that he has and probably some of the problems that he's caused.
Okay, right here, right here.
Now, I know Trump called him a loser, so they did exchange, and he called him a little child.
They had an exchange of childish insults.
All right, but forget about that for a minute.
Let's talk about what Sadiq Khan is talking about, because he's representing the left, and what Donald Trump is talking about, because he's representing Donald Trump, Trump's version of right-winger, of right-wingery.
Sadiq Khan is talking about climate change, how terrible this is, and LGBT rights, and abortion rights, and diversity, and this one.
And Donald Trump is saying, you know, you're not helping your country, and you're not helping your people.
London is in the midst of an incredible crime spree.
They had a murder rate one year that was worse than New York's.
They're banning knives, which because they banned guns and that didn't do anything.
So people just started stabbing each other.
Because guess what?
It's people who kill other people.
It's not the weapons themselves.
That's absurd.
So they're banning knives.
I don't know how they cut their stakes anymore.
He goes with a spoon.
It's just going to work.
The city is congested to the point it's unbelievable.
I mean, the last time I, London, I lived in London a long time, as you know.
It's the only place I have ever felt at home.
It's the only time in my entire life I ever felt like I wasn't just visiting this planet.
I loved it.
That city is gone.
Under Sadiq Khan, that city no longer exists.
I mean, it is just packed.
It is crime-ridden.
You know, I used to walk home at 3 o'clock in the morning with no worries whatsoever.
Sadiq Khan has let that city fall apart.
Talking about the love and the tolerance and the sweetness and light of the left, there's some protests going on against Trump.
Of course, they're not as big as they were last time, and everybody's so thrilled.
The New York Times is so thrilled that they have that baby balloon.
Here's one Trump supporter in a crowd of these left-wing fascists.
Listen to the love and the tolerance coming from the left-wingers.
See, he's an older man.
You couldn't see this.
The poor Bobby, the lady cop who's about five foot three.
They put those girls out there completely unarmed.
She's surrounded by a mob.
She looks terrified.
The face of a twisted anger and hatred on the left.
That's the real left.
That is the left.
That's who they are.
Chicago's Immigration Dilemma00:14:53
You know, so that's what we're complaining about.
But it's also about the fact that their policies don't work.
The reason the Republicans keep having an apocalypse that never comes, the reason critics and the predictors and the commentators keep saying we're going to vanish, but we never vanish, is because what they do stinks how utterly they have failed.
I mean, Chicago over the weekend, Chicago over the weekend.
Now, remember, the homicide rate in America is dropping to historic lows.
It's close to historic lows now.
52 people, 52 people were shot in the city of Chicago over the weekend, eight of them fatally.
Two people were stabbed to death.
Jussie Smollett is now the only person who has not been assaulted in Chicago.
He's the only guy who was lying when he said he was attacked in Chicago.
Everyone else is telling the truth.
Here is the police superintendent, Eddie Johnson.
What's the problem?
Here he tells you.
The truth is, and I know you all are tired of hearing me say it, but as long as we fail to create repercussions for carrying and using illegal guns, or more importantly, hold repeat violent offenders accountable for their actions, we're simply going to continue to have these discussions on Monday mornings.
Because it's the same people who are pulling the triggers in some of these communities.
This isn't a widespread issue among Chicagoans.
It's the same people.
There's a small subset of individuals who think they can play by their own rules because they continue to get a slap on the wrist despite legislation we had passed last year for being a repeat gun offender and breaking the law.
I'm tired of it, and you all should be tired of it too.
The Chicago Police Department simply cannot do this alone.
We're making investments into our long-term strategy, which is predicated on education and mentoring.
Just last week, Mary Emmanuel announced another $10 million to expand mentoring to the seventh grade.
We need everyone, and I mean everyone, especially our judicial partners, to start making repeat offenders, gun offenders, feel real consequences for their crimes.
So he's talking about leniency.
This is the thing that turned America into a crime cesspool in the 70s and 80s was left-wing leniency from the courts.
That's what he's talking about.
The police are arresting them.
They're sending them back out in the street.
They're not holding them responsible.
All this talk you hear about mass incarceration in the 80s, how evil, oh, the terrible mass, it wasn't mass incarceration.
No one was mass incarcerated.
Criminals were put behind bars.
They used sophisticated new methods.
ComStat, zero tolerance policing, that's what cleaned up the cities.
While the left screamed fascist, fascist, fascist, racist, racist, racist, diversity, diversity, diversity, conservatives like Rudy Giuliani cleaned up Dodge.
And that's what, so this is the way their cities look.
This is the way their cities look.
Now the new mayor, everybody's saying, oh, how wonderful.
She's a lesbian black woman or whatever she is.
I think that's what it is.
Who cares?
Who cares?
A right-winger sitting at home gnawing their fingernails in Chicago because the mayor is a lesbian black woman?
No, they're biting their fingers because they don't want to get shot to death because of the stupid left-wing policies.
You know, it's happening everywhere.
I mean, San Francisco is a mess.
LA, the LA Times, right, also a left-wing paper, had a story called Rats at the Police Station, Filth on LA Streets, Scenes from the Collapse of a City That's Lost Control.
This was by Steve Lopez.
He said, we've got thousands of people huddled on the streets, many of them withering away with physical and mental disease.
Sidewalks have disappeared, hidden by tents and the kinds of makeshift shanties you see in third world places.
Typhoid and typhus are in the news, and an army of rodents is on the move.
Dr. Drew Lipinski, I think it was, was saying that we're going to get bubonic plague that's already in the march.
That's the Black Death, folks, that killed a third of Europe.
Now we can treat it, but still, not a good thing.
I mean, this is an incredible, this is what happens in left-wing places, and people tolerate it because they keep getting fed this garbage about diversity.
Oh, it's all about diversity.
It's all about tolerance.
It's all about compassion.
And then one day, millennials grow up.
They get to be adults and they say, this sucks.
I don't want to live like this.
I have compassion.
I like diversity.
But these policies, which is what all that talk hides, these policies suck.
Here's a documentary, the first minute of a documentary that was made by K-O-M-O Como in Seattle.
This is a local TV station in Seattle, one of the most beautiful, used to be one of the most beautiful cities in the country.
This is their local documentary.
What if Seattle is dying and we don't even know it?
This story is about a seething, simmering anger that is now boiling over into outrage.
It is about people who have felt compassion, yes, but who no longer feel safe, no longer feel like they are heard, no longer feel protected.
It is about lost souls who wander our streets, untethered to home or family or reality, chasing a drug which in turn chases them.
It is about the damage they inflict on themselves, to be sure, but also on the fabric of this place where we live.
This story is about a beautiful jewel that has been violated and a crisis of faith amongst a generation of Seattes falling out of love with their home.
There is another part of this story, too.
It's about a solution, an idea for a city that has run out of them.
And I ask again, what if Seattle is dying?
Diversity is garbage.
That's a city filled with garbage.
It's all these things, climate panic.
It's always panic, right?
Climate panic, racism panic, all the different panics that the left sells you are all to get you to sign on to policies that destroy things.
It's the right that cleaned these cities up in the 70s and 80s.
They did it while people called them fascists.
Reagan cleaned up America while people called him fascists.
It is all a lot of crap.
The Republicans and conservatives will not disappear as long as leftists don't know how to govern.
Hey, we have Ted Cruz.
I'm not going to break because I want you to hear this interview with Ted Cruz.
He dropped by the studio a couple of days ago and I asked him some of the questions about where the right is going.
I'm not going to push you off, but please subscribe at dailywire.com so you can be in the mailbag tomorrow, ask your questions.
I will solve all your problems.
Senator Cruz, thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
It's good to be with you.
Well, you are one of the very few, if not the only, American politician that could also be considered an intellectual or at least have an intellect, which well in the political world, I'm not sure that's a terribly high bar.
But so I want to ask you some big picture questions about things that are actually troubling me.
The election of Donald Trump, whether he's a great president or a terrible president, anything in between, seems to me to speak, to bespeak a disconnect between the GOP, the standard establishment GOP, and the people who are supposed to be their voters.
Do you agree with that?
Undoubtedly.
Look, the American people have been getting more and more frustrated with Washington and with career politicians in both parties, with Democrats and Republicans.
My election to the Senate was fueled by the grassroots, by Texans who were frustrated that politicians sounded great on the stomp, and then they went to Washington and they didn't do what they said.
If you look at 2016, one of the easiest ways to understand Trump's election in 2016 is it was a giant screw you to Washington.
And they wanted someone who would blow the place up.
And to be honest, that was a lot of the support behind my campaign in 2016, and that was a lot of the support behind Trump's campaign, was the frustration that both parties, that Washington itself was corrupt.
You know, the phrase the swamp really does capture what we've got.
So specifically, what, I mean, there are all these people out in the Midwest who are killing themselves with opiates.
You know, Barack Obama saying, oh, those jobs are never going to.
What specifically was the GOP not seeing?
Look, the GOP was listening to the lobbyists and K-Street and Special Interest and the people that were getting left behind.
I think one of the most important divides in this line is the socioeconomic divide.
The 2016 election was decided by working class voters.
It was decided by truck drivers and steel workers and waiters and waitresses and cops and firefighters.
And frankly, both parties had been ignoring them.
Both parties had been responding to Wall Street, responding to big business, responding to lobbyists.
You take an issue like immigration.
Immigration, both parties have effectively supported illegal immigration for a long time.
The Democrats, because they believe illegal immigrants coming in will vote Democrat and they want them to vote as quickly as possible.
And Republicans, because too many Republicans, listen to big business, and big business thinks more immigration is great because it's cheap labor.
And the working men and women are the ones who get left behind.
If you look at the 2016 election, I think it was the working class voters who decided the primary.
It's why Trump and I were the last two standing, because both of us, that's who we were responding to.
And it's why Trump beat Hillary and the general, because working class voters had been facing economic stagnation for 20 years.
We're right now bringing manufacturing jobs back to America for the first time in decades.
And that's because we're finally responding.
We should be, I believe Republicans should be the party of jobs and the party of working men and women.
If we are, that's a path to success.
So what do you say to people who say, look, you have free markets, you have a global free market, it's good for everybody.
And yes, Steven Pinker said, you know, yes, some of our guys are out of work, but people in Nigeria are getting jobs.
And that's, as a citizen of the world, that's a good thing.
I'm not a citizen of the world.
But it does seem to me that the opposite answer, which you get from guys that I respect, like Tucker Carlson, is a kind of Ludditism that, no, we can't move forward.
We can't automate.
How do you square that circle?
Listen, I believe in technology and I believe in free trade.
I believe in the power of free markets.
The greatest enemy poverty has ever seen is the American free enterprise system.
Now, one of the greatest enemies to free enterprise is cronyism.
One of the things people fail to understand is big business is perfectly fine with big government.
Big business gets in bed with big government.
What I'm focused on is not the giant corporations.
They don't need my help.
They'll be just fine.
What I'm focused on is small businesses.
If you care about jobs, you want small businesses.
You want lots of small businesses.
You want them growing.
You want them innovating.
You want them challenging the status quo.
Let me give an example.
Let's take a law like Dodd-Frank.
So Dodd-Frank, as you know, came out of the financial crisis.
And it was pitched as stopping too big to fail.
Let's stop these giant banks.
And that's how the American people were sold on Dodd-Frank.
Well, what's happened?
The big banks have all gotten bigger.
They have a larger market share.
And what Dodd-Frank has done is it has driven out of business thousands of smaller banks, of community financial institutions.
And a point that I make all over the state is I say, look, that was not an unintended consequence.
That wasn't like, oops, we didn't see that.
That was the intended consequence because the lobbyists for the giant banks were sitting there in the Democratic senator's offices when they were drafting Dodd-Frank.
And what happens when you put massive regulations on everybody?
The giant companies, they can absorb it.
They've got armies of lawyers.
They've got armies of accountants.
They can cover the costs.
But the little guys, that's the difference between staying in business and being driven out of business.
And we need to see more, you know, what the economist Schumpeter called creative destruction.
We need to see more little guys challenging the status quo.
And that's good for everybody.
So you win the election.
You get both houses of Congress.
You have Trump in there.
Nothing happens on immigration.
I mean, to me, the most offensive thing about immigration is not the people coming in.
It's the fact that the rule of law doesn't exist.
The same people who pass the laws say they shouldn't be, it's wrong to enforce them.
How come you guys couldn't get anything done?
You know, there's a disconnect in Washington.
The people who care about principles and issues don't know what they're doing.
And the people who know what they're doing don't care about principles and issues.
And so you get it's like two ships passing in the night.
Absolutely, we should have legislated on immigration and fixed the problem.
But look, I made an impassioned pitch to my colleagues in the Senate.
I made it, I did a whole PowerPoint presentation over lunch to all the Republican senators saying last year in 2018, when we had both houses, we should take up what's called a budget reconciliation.
If you remember, that's how we passed the tax cut.
Budget reconciliation, the important thing about that is it can't be filibustered.
It means the Democrats couldn't have stopped it.
And I argued we should take up a budget reconciliation and we ought to get more victories.
We had some great victories in the last two years.
I'm gratified for everything we did, but we could have done more.
And what I argued we should do is four things.
Number one, build the wall.
Stop making promises, fully fund, fully build the wall.
Number two, we should have made the individual tax cuts and the small business tax cuts permanent.
Number three, we should have passed what I call the Obamacare consensus reforms.
We didn't have 50 votes in the last Congress to repeal Obamacare, tragically, and something I have fought for every day in the Senate.
But we did have 50 votes to expand competition, to expand options, and to drive down premiums.
That would have been a significant victory for the people who elected us.
And number four, we should have passed what's called the Reigns Act.
The Reigns Act says that any economic regulation that imposes $100 million or more of cost on the economy, it can't go into effect without an affirmative up-down vote from Congress.
Would have been the most significant regulatory reform in U.S. history.
We could have done all of those.
No Democrat could have stopped us.
And I made that pitch to Senate Republican leadership.
I made that pitch directly to the president.
I made it to the vice president.
I made it to the chief of staff.
And at the end of the day, no one put in the energy to get it done.
They just said, no, we're not going to do it.
Should Mitch McConnell get rid of the filibuster that's now not even a filibuster?
So I believe we should have done that.
Why We Left The Filibuster00:08:37
And that's actually an issue I've changed my mind on.
So if you had asked me three, four years ago, should we get rid of the filibuster, I would have told you no.
And in fact, I had said no publicly.
And the reason is I think historically the filibuster has been a conservative policy.
The filibuster slows down the movement of government.
And slowing down government moving is often a conservative outcome.
If you think about it, we have had three Democratic supermajorities in modern times.
The first gave us the New Deal.
The second gave us the Great Society.
And the third gave us Obamacare at Dodd-Frank.
If you get rid of the filibuster, every Democratic majority becomes a supermajority.
So why did I change my mind?
I changed my mind on two things.
Number one, the level of obstruction we're seeing from Democrats is truly unprecedented.
Used to be the filibuster was a tool to stop really egregious legislation, legislation you really, really disagreed with.
Now, Democrats are filibustering everything.
It's simply an across-the-board obstruction.
But secondly, the Democrats in the Senate have become radicalized.
So I think the instant Democrats get the majority again, they'll end the state.
That's the other thing.
Yeah, that's what seems like that to me, too.
And so if I believed it would actually constrain Democrats, I would be far less willing to end the filibuster.
But I think it's idiotic that it's a one-way constraint, that it ties our hands, but not the other sides.
Now, that being said, I think ending the filibuster is much less compelling now than it was two years ago.
With a Democratic House, with an Nancy Pelosi House, even if we end the filibuster, nothing good and substantive is going to make it through an Nancy Pelosi house.
So there's less urgency to end the filibuster.
If we were going to do it, we should have done it two years ago when we had a Republican House and we could actually get some of the victories we needed.
So the left has become radicalized.
I mean, that seems pretty clear.
They're completely out of their minds.
Has the right lost its way?
That's actually not fair to radicals.
Is Trump's election also an indication that conservatism needs to be somehow reconstituted?
I mean, I hear people say, talk about the old mediating institutions.
We need churches, we need clubs, we need all the things that keep us families, all the things that govern us when we don't have a government.
On the other hand, I hear conservatives say, if you can't get off your butt and move when your town falls apart because the factory leaves and go somewhere else, that's on you because capitalism is capitalism.
And I feel like, well, wait a minute.
It's a long time to build.
It takes a long time to build a mediating institution.
So what is conservative, conservatism, not Republicanism?
What is conservatism missing about the present moment?
Well, let me take a couple of pieces of that because there was a lot of content in what you asked.
Listen, I worry, I know a lot of Americans worry about how divided we are today, about the polarization, about the anger, about the vitriol.
The extreme left of the Democratic Party is fueled by hatred right now in a way that's not productive.
It's not good.
You know, I remember when I was in college, I was a debater.
Yeah, I was one of the cool kids.
And I was the head of the Conservative Party in the debating society.
And a good friend of mine was the head of the Liberal Party.
And we used to, we would argue, we would have knockdown, drag-out debates.
And, you know, I'd call him a communist.
He'd call me a fascist.
And then we'd go out and get a beer.
But like, you know, it wasn't this blood feud that we must salt your fields and taint the blood of your descendants.
I mean, that's where we are right now.
And part of it is we've become so tribalized.
I mean, there's one team or the other.
And if you're on one team, you stand with that team.
If you're on the other one.
The mediating institutions you referenced, social media and the internet, it's wonderful in that it lets everyone speak and engage, but it also lets us very much select our friends.
So, you know, the phenomenon of unfriending someone, okay, you have used, they're different than mine.
Nope, you're not my friend.
And it used to be that if, you know, you'd go to work, you'd go to church, you'd go to school, and you'd have friends who were Democrats.
You'd have friends who were liberals.
You might have friends who were communists.
And when you know someone, when you laugh with someone, when your kids play together, it's harder to believe they're the devil.
You might think they're wrong, but the demonization, I think, is really unhealthy.
Now, how we fix it is a very complicated thing.
But on conservatism itself, the philosophy of conservatism, is it out of date?
I mean, is there something, we seem so far from the idea of limited government of enumerated powers.
We seem so far from that.
Is there any way back there?
I think the beauty of eternal truth is that it's always true.
Freedom is an eternal.
If you look at it, and we're actually getting back to the big picture arguments right now, as the Democratic Party gallops to the left, as they embrace socialism, we're having the fundamental argument in the United States between socialism and free enterprise.
And the tension throughout much of history is between liberty and government power.
And that tension, you know, if you think about the founding of our country, For most of humanity, we've been governed by kings and queens and monarchs.
And the principle, the understanding was that sovereignty comes from the top.
Sovereignty resides in the monarchs, and any rights we have are just given by grace, by whims, like crumbs off the table.
You think of the framing, the founding of the United States, the framers inverted the concept of sovereignty.
They said sovereignty doesn't begin with a king.
It begins with we the people.
And that sovereignty, the rights, on the other hand, the rights, your rights, my rights, they're not given to us by government.
They're given by God Almighty.
And if you and I have inherent natural rights as a human being to life, to liberty, to property, then those rights, you know, Jefferson referred to the Constitution as chains to bind the mischief of government.
There's enormous mischief.
Now, listen, have we galloped stunningly far from where the framers envision things?
Yes.
But at the same time, I think we can move back in the direction of limiting government and freeing up individuals.
And we've seen, look, the power of government has tended to be a pendulum.
And when we move in a direction of freeing up small businesses and entrepreneurs, freeing up individuals, the country does better.
And those principles are true regardless.
Last question.
Since I'm out of time, I would continue to pepper you with questions, but will they impeach?
I think they will.
They will.
Now, look, it's important for people to understand that impeachment is like an indictment.
It is the House bringing charges.
And it only takes a majority.
And I think the Democrats are almost irrevocably on that path.
I think Democratic leadership, I think Pelosi doesn't want to go there.
But they've unleashed the angriest demons in their party.
And those voices of rage, the pitchforks and the torches are coming.
And I think we'll see probably next summer, next spring or summer, I think we'll see impeachment proceedings in the House.
And I do think they vote to impeach.
And then in the Senate, we will see, in all likelihood, a very brief trial.
And the president will not be removed from office.
It takes two-thirds in the Senate.
And the votes aren't there.
So I fully expect this to be almost entirely a partisan exercise.
And listen, you see from Democrats right now, it's not based on the facts and evidence.
I mean, look, two months ago, Bob Mueller was St. Bach.
And then the report came in and concluded there was no conclusion that they didn't find evidence of a crime.
And suddenly they're like, Bob who?
We don't know any Bob.
No, no, no, no.
We're going to impeach for other things.
It is pure partisan anger that's driving it.
And so I think that's going to result in impeachment.
And ultimately, what I think the American people want to see is lower taxes, less regulations, more jobs, higher opportunity, a secure border and protecting our rights.
If we do that, we're doing our job.
If we run around in a circle shooting each other, we're not doing our job.
Seems basic.
Senator Cruz, thanks so much for coming on.
Impeachment Partisanship00:02:50
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
You see, conservatives talking about what matters, and that's Senator Ted Cruz, who used to be the most hated man in Washington.
Forget that.
But he is a terrific conservative senator and talking about things that actually count.
Final reflection.
There's this guy in Vox, a guy named Carlos Maza, who has been attacking, using Vox to attack Stephen Crowder and saying, oh, Crowder, a terrific comedian who says all these politically incorrect things or true things or however you want to put that.
Anyway, he's been trying to get Crowder banned because they can't just argue with him.
They can't say they don't like him.
They've got to actually silence people they don't like.
It's incredible.
So Crowder put out this 20-minute apology video, which is absolutely hilarious.
It's just Steven Crowder's just called, I'm sorry, here's a minute of it.
My deepest regrets to the Yorkshire Terriers and the Yorkie enthusiast community for implying that they are not real dogs and quote, make good soup.
Also, I apologize again to the Asian community for insisting that many of them eat dogs.
I should be more mindful and tolerant of others' culture and culinary customs.
I'm sorry to Brett Baer for insidering that his hairline was so low that I couldn't, quote, tell where his eyebrows ended and forehead begins.
I apologize to noted hip-hop star MC Bulletproof for within 24 hours of his untimely death, stating in jest that, quote, apparently God sided with his notorious rival MC Armor Piercing Bullets.
I now see that it was both ill-timed and performed in poor taste.
I'm sorry to my good friend Andrew Clavin for my statements regarding my requirement in wearing quote solar eclipse glasses just to look in the general direction of his gleaming bald skull and subsequently following it up with the implication that quote he would make a great Captain America villain.
I take it back.
He should be kicked off YouTube.
Crowder is a great guy.
He just happens to have a crappy mug.
I'll see you tomorrow.
It's Mailbag Day.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
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